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Small-town editor digs for truth

Since 2007, Stanley Nelson, working at his desk inside The Concordia Sentinel in Ferriday, La., where he is editor, has written some 200 stories about the KKK’s 1964 slaying of shoe shop owner Frank Morris — a killing loosely portrayed in Greg Iles’ new novel, “Natchez Burning.” Nelson is also loosely portrayed in the novel as editor Henry Sexton.(Photo: Jerry Mitchell/The Clarion-Ledger)

FERRIDAY, La. – Stanley Nelson had no intention of writing more than one story about the 1964 killing of Frank Morris when he first learned of it in 2007.

But the past has a way of invading the present, and Nelson found himself drawn into a mystery he felt compelled to solve.

More than 200 stories later, the 58-year-old editor of The Concordia Sentinel has been named a Pulitzer Prize finalist and is depicted fictionally in Greg Iles' new novel, "Natchez Burning."

Nelson is flattered Iles would base a character on him, but confesses he shares little in common with his alter ego, journalist Henry Sexton. "He has had a much more adventurous life than me," he said. "He is a musician, has a girlfriend and is tech savvy — that's something I don't know a damn thing about."

Nelson was born in this town of 3,500 with its notorious past and struggling present.

By the time the Civil War began in 1861, Concordia Parish had 13,000 slaves and 1,000 white residents, most of them overseers and their families at plantations.

A half-century later, Ferriday looked to sawmills and railroads for economic salvation.

The town was still reeling from the Depression when Morris opened a shoe shop in the late 1930s.

People from both sides of Louisiana Avenue, the dividing line between the black and white communities here, came to Morris' shoe shop.

"A lot of families could only afford a single pair of shoes for their kids," Nelson said. "Frank Morris was the one who fixed them."

The 51-year-old Morris brought the repaired shoes outside to his white, female customers, Nelson said. "The rumor that he was flirting with white women simply wasn't true. That was a rumor started by the Klan."

The shoe shop man was asleep on a cot in the back of his store when he heard glass breaking just after midnight on Dec. 10, 1964.

He bolted to the front of the store and saw two men, one pouring gasoline on the outside of the building and the other holding a shotgun.

A flaming match fell into the gasoline, and the building exploded into an inferno. Morris tried to escape out the front door — only to run into the shotgun and the man behind it yelling, "Get back in there, n-----!"

By the time Morris made it out the back, his feet were bleeding, his hair was on fire, and all that remained of his clothing were the waistband of his boxer shorts and the shoulder straps of his undershirt. They were smoldering.

Morris survived long enough to speak to the FBI, telling agents he didn't know his attackers, but friends wondered if he had been afraid to say.

On Feb. 28, 2007, Nelson heard Morris' name for the first time. The Justice Department had released it on a list of victims' names from unpunished killings during the civil rights era.

Within two hours, he had written his first story, believing that would be his last.

But more information came his way and so did a telephone call from Morris' granddaughter, Rosa Williams. She shared the story of how she had been 12 when he died.

She thanked him for his articles and told him she had learned more from him than anything before about her grandfather's death.

Nelson could hear her pain and thought of the time in high school when he was riding on a school bus back from a football game and saw smoke pouring from a smashed Volkswagen Beetle. Fire had engulfed the family inside.

A little girl had stood on the back seat, trying to escape. Workers tried desperately to rescue her and her parents, but the flames had proved too intense.

The nightmare he witnessed began to recur in his mind as he dug deeper into the Morris killing. How could one human hate another so much that he set him on fire?

In the 1960s, the White Knights of the Ku Klux Klan in Mississippi were the most violent white supremacist group in the U.S., responsible for dozens of beatings, bombings and killings, many of those in southwest Mississippi, while the Original Knights of the KKK terrorized Louisiana.

But a handful of Klansmen felt they were spending too much time with public parades, rather than in private violence.

Those violent believers formed a terrorist cell known as the Silver Dollar Group (depicted in "Natchez Burning" as the Double Eagles).

About 20 Klansmen joined the underground cell, and their leader, Red Glover, handed each a silver dollar, most minted in their birth years, as proof of membership.

In his investigation, aided by the Cold Case Justice Initiative at Syracuse University's College of Law, LSU journalism students and others, Nelson discovered the Silver Dollar Group had killed at least five people on both sides of the Mississippi River.

Those slayings included Morris (depicted in "Natchez Burning" as that of musician Albert Norris); the 1964 killings of Henry Hezekiah Dee and Charles Eddie Moore, who were beaten in the Homochitto National Forest and drowned in an old part of the Mississippi River; the 1965 beating death of Earl Hodges in Franklin County; and the 1967 bombing of Wharlest Jackson in Natchez.

And that was hardly all their violence, Nelson found.

The FBI believed the Silver Dollar Group had been behind the disappearance of Joe Edwards, who vanished on July 12, 1964 — only to have his 1958 Buick mysteriously reappear near the town's bowling alley. Agents also believed the group in 1965 had bombed Natchez NAACP leader George Metcalfe, who miraculously survived.

Nelson believed the terrorist cell could have been behind the KKK's 1964 killing of Clifton Walker near Woodville, the April 1964 attempted killing of Richard Joe Butler of Adams County and dozens of beatings and burnings on both sides of the river.

The Silver Dollar Group carried out this violence in belief a race war would ensue, he said. "They were going to fight to the death."

In 1967, an FBI informant identified four men as being involved in Morris' killing, but the more Nelson investigated, the more that story seemed to fall apart.

He dug deeper, even as he continued covering the school board, the police jury, the courthouse, crime, trials and the local drainage commission.

Robert Rosenthal, who heads the San Francisco-based Center for Investigative Reporting, has worked with many great journalists over his career and ranks working with Nelson as one of the best.

"Stanley is one of my heroes," he said. "He combines tenacity, courage and a special level of integrity that make me proud to be associated with him."

Iles said the idea of a lone journalist at a small newspaper outpacing the FBI in his investigations inspired the character of Henry Sexton.

"Stanley Nelson picked up the torch that was dropped all those years ago and continued the search for justice," he said. "That's true heroism."

Some readers of The Concordia Sentinel were far from happy with Nelson's investigations, but the editor said the Hanna family, owners of the newspaper, stood behind him.

He received threats, and their building became a target of hate. "I've been cursed and called more creative things than I thought were possible," he said.

One angry caller questioned why he was doing this.

"I'm trying to solve a murder," he replied.

"You can't do that — you're just a reporter," the caller said before slamming the phone down.

Nelson vowed to the family that he would see the story through. "If the local newspaper doesn't do this work," he asked, "who will?"

The deputy was angry with Morris, who insisted on being paid for repairing the officer's boots, he said. "Frank Morris had the audacity to stand up to him."

DeLaughter, a Klansman convicted of police brutality, has since died.

In 2010, Nelson tracked down three witnesses who told him Arthur Leonard Spencer had acknowledged involvement in Morris' attack but claimed he and fellow Klansmen didn't mean to kill the shoe shop operator.

The FBI talked to the witnesses, but rejected their statements, concluding they were lying or their words didn't match the evidence.

Spencer died last year.

In January, Paige Fitzgerald, deputy chief in charge of the Justice Department's Cold Case Initiative, wrote Morris' granddaughter: "The investigation has produced no credible evidence implicating anyone who could currently be prosecuted. We have no choice but to close our investigation."

Nelson hasn't given up. He said there are at least three Silver Dollar Group members still alive.

He believes they and others know something about the Silver Dollar Group's killings of Morris and others — and have yet to share what they know.

He quoted from Proverbs: "A man who is laden with the guilt of human blood will be a fugitive until death; let no one support him."

For Nelson, that means "you support somebody by your silence," he said. "If you know something about a killer and you're not sharing it, you're supporting him."